all I want

All I want for Christmas is a garage. Scraping my car's windows every morning got old sometime in the last couple years.

And welcome to the worst of the pre-application date craziness: this is when students and parents start panicking about our November 30th priority date. Panicking means calls shoot through the roof, and virtually no one on the other end of the line is in a pleasant frame of mind. And now, of course, is when virtually the entire office takes two days off (Thanksgiving and the day after).

A word to the wise: if all of your materials haven't been received by us by Thanksgiving, you might as well kiss the possibility of being on time goodbye.

Perhaps that's too harsh. But five days (or four, depending on if you get the day after Thanksgiving off or not--we don't officially, but most people take a vacation day) is generally not long enough for standardized test scores or high school transcripts to reach us. And if you're having trouble with the password to your online application? It usually takes two days of back-and-forth emails for us to confirm your identity and then reset your password. I used to be the only one in the office officially handling those problems, I might add.

Are you sensing some stress here? Nah.